From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Tue Aug 19 2003 - 01:22:19 MDT
At 12:38 AM 19/08/03 -0500, you wrote:
>I haven't jumped to the conspiracy position on the Northeast power outage
>myself, though I haven't completely put it out of my mind either.
I happen to be an EE and have been following mass power failures for a
*long* time, clear back to 1967. I consider it unlikely in the extreme
that any humans intended the latest blackout to happen.
>However if true, it wouldn't be the first time that Cheney has had
>firsthand involvement in such a thing. Disclosures since the California
>rolling blackouts increasingly point to deliberate and deceptive
>manipulations of the energy market by with the deliberate intention, or at
>least the knowledge that putting California in the dark was the likely
>outcome.
On the other hand, the California rolling blackouts were a side effect of
the largest organized consumer fraid ever to hit the US. The engineering
magazines are reporting that there were engineers *writing programs* to
optimize the profits by taking advantage of unneeded power plant shutdowns
and limited transmission capacity to force up the price of electricity.
The engineering societies have not come to a conclusion about what to do to
make obeying your employer a violation of professional standards when the
employer is abusing society this way. It should be noted that many of the
people who were ordered to do this were foreign H1B visa engineers with the
obvious high levels of control that implies.
>It wouldn't even surprise me if Ken Lay and Dick Cheney actually discussed
>this conspiracy at their secret governmental meeting while they were
>setting the energy policies that everyone will have to live with. Of
>course we may never know for certain since they were secret.
>
>Your points however stand out very clearly. If I "prophesy" that
>Californians will suffer power outages if they do not vote for me, it
>doesn't really count as a prophesy if I am effectively the person with the
>switchbox.
Your points are well taken.
Incidentally, in spite of my qualifications, you should not be absolutely
sure the blackout was not the result of a conspiracy. I am consistently
not paranoid enough. The failure looks like it was the result of neglect.
Keith Henson
PS. Had the US gone into space in a massive way back in the late 70s and
built large numbers of solar power satellites there wouldn't be the looming
energy problems.
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